Bing takes on Google

Microsoft has launched Bing.com to challenge Google’s dominance.

Microsoft has rolled out a UK version of Bing, its search engine, with localised results and services

By Matt Warman

5:30PM BST 28 May 2009

The news on Thursday that Microsoft was launching a search engine heralded a wave of questions: was www.bing.com finally going to challenge Google’s dominance? Is a new type of search really needed? And can Microsoft really hope to catch up with the web’s pre-eminent site?

The answers are in the numbers, and chief among those is the fact that 40 per cent of all search questions go unanswered, according to Microsoft’s research. More than 50 per cent of searches are in fact repeats of previous enquiries. It’s a statistic that anecdotal evidence backs to the hilt, and Microsoft’s plan to build a search engine that makes a better attempt to understand people’s questions is one many users will probably welcome.

But here’s another number: two. Microsoft’s Ashley Highfield, the man who brought the UK the iPlayer when he worked for the BBC, talks tough and wonders out loud whether Google has been resting on its laurels for the past 10 years or so. But he’s honest enough to say that the company’s target for Bing, in the medium term at least, is to be the world’s second most popular search engine, after Google. Since it will be taking over all Windows Live’s search traffic, that target is, at least, achievable.

To get there, Microsoft will need to do more than convince people of the obvious merits of Bing’s features (detailed below) – they will need to persuade the public they’re a part of the internet’s vast number of friendly companies, because in the age of Web 2.0, users only visit sites where they’re comfortable with “the brand”. Facebook, Twitter and Google are all brands billions of people are comfortable with. Highfield calls Bing’s technology the first mass-market example of intuitive “search 2.0”, but Microsoft has to get people to try it. That is one reason why there will be no Bing marketing for a few months, because Microsoft’s UK team will need to tune the British site.

Ask Highfield what went wrong with Bing’s little-loved predecessor, Live Search, and he says it was “before my time” – although he believes it is a match for Google in many areas. But ask him about the even less loved Vista operating system and he doesn’t duck the question: he says

Related Articles

So Bing is the biggest example of Microsoft’s new public face: friendly, human, interesting but even occasionally, as its changing homepage images indicate, surprising. Bing has a mountain to climb, but Highfield and Microsoft know that there might not be much call for the Microsoft of old if Google has its way with the web.

Homepage

Bing looks very different from Google – a picture reflecting the user’s location fills the homepage and it is updated daily. Hovering the mouse over certain points will reveal facts about it – a cityscape, for instance, would be used to give information about the most obvious buildings.

Basic searches

The immediate differences in searching, however, might not strike most users as that radical: Bing automatically suggests refinements to terms, and then brings up answers relating only to those ideas – so the system was demonstrated by a search for physicist Steven Hawking, and it suggests “biography”, “quotes” or “books by”. The resulting pages, therefore, only contain the right information. Google does not seem to be as consistent in the standard of its results, but it does do something very similar. Down the left-hand side, Bing includes what Microsoft is calling “galleries”, offering links to relevant searches. All of this is designed to save the user time.

Specific searches

Where Bing scores significantly higher than Google is in very specific searches; search for Facebook, say, and it shows only one answer, because most people would simply be looking to get to Facebook. Another link does offer more traditional results. Search for a flight number and Bing instantly brings up schedule data and follows it with information about the airport and the destinations.

Coping with complexity

A huge proportion of web searches are devoted to helping people make decisions, such as where to go on holiday, which restaurant to book or what products to buy. In a bid to simplify this process, Bing automates results to show maps of hotels or restaurant locations, and pulls in reviews from other sites to help users decide. Again, the site beats Google on this, and it brings everything to one place: that means a lot less visiting of websites only to discover that they’re not relevant, and it means far fewer repeat searches.